SEO and Google’s GBoard: What You Need to Know

Google’s new keyboard app for iOS may return results slightly differently from other use cases — something that digital marketers and SEO professionals may want to track. Google’s keyboard app is designed to make it easier than ever to query the search engine, and to that end has a couple of differences:

It doesn’t use long-term memory. Google will usually use past search results to inform future search results. It will notice if you’re always searching for activities in New York and will assume that a subsequent restaurant search is also for New York. But GBoard is only going to do this for a single session. Once you close the app, all the prior information is gone.

It wants to give direct answers. It’s likely that Google will use GBoard to promote its knowledgebase, something that Google has been slowly working towards for some time — attempting to provide direct answers to questions along with its assortment of links.

It doesn’t support ads. GBoard isn’t going to be a good place for mobile advertising because it isn’t going to have any. Instead, the results are provided in a concise format.

It gives news additional prominence. News articles are already promoted to the top of traditional Google results, but GBoard adds even more news links into the mix.

It uses mobile search algorithms. But other than the above changes, GBoard primarily uses the same algorithms as traditional mobile search.

GBoard doesn’t alter mobile SEO results significantly, but many of the small changes represent shifts that Google has been working towards for years. It also highlights how search results may differ not only on a device-to-device but also an app-to-app basis.